Good RPGs die by bad menus

I've dropped more mobile RPGs over clunky menus than over bad combat. It sounds petty, but when you're managing a party of four across skill trees, inventories and quests, the interface is basically half the game.

The worst offenders bury important actions three taps deep and reset your scroll position every time you back out. Emberhollow Saga, which I recently reviewed, gets this right by keeping the most-used screens one tap away and remembering where you were. It's a small thing that adds up over dozens of hours.

There's a lesson here for developers: the fantasy of an RPG lives in the moment-to-moment friction, not just the story beats. If equipping a new sword feels like paperwork, the whole experience sags.

When I test an RPG now, I spend the first hour just navigating. If I'm already tired of the menus before the story gets going, that's a red flag no amount of good writing will fix.